Message for Troglodytes

Visitors to Russia who insist on saying "Spasibo" ("Thank you") for services rendered reveal themselves to knowing Russians not only as foreigners but as class enemies. The good Soviet citizen avoids such courtesies. In Russia's October Revolution and the bloody civil war, the Bolsheviks learned that one way to spot an enemy was to listen to his speech. A cultivated diction and politeness were the caste marks of the bourgeoisie; polite speech, like the bourgeoisie, soon went out of fashion.

Someone remembered that Karl Marx himself had said that the bourgeoisie had a language of its own. Lenin had made some remarks about the existence of separate cultures within the capitalist state, and Joseph Stalin declared that the bourgeoisie guided culture. On these slender foundations arose a whole school of Marxist philology. Its chief oracle was a philology professor called Nikolai Marr, the son of a Scottish father and a Georgian mother; he was 53 when the revolution broke out, but embraced Bolshevism with youthful fervor. Marr advocated the development of one universal language, not necessarily Russian, for World Communism. Marr died in 1934, but his work was carried on by disciples.

Marx Said So. By 1950 there were many among the new generation of Bolsheviks who thought that Russian was good enough for them. A learned controversy in Pravda last month aired views for & against the Marr theory. Last week Stalin personally ended the argument with an 8,000-word statement on language. He was no philologist himself, Stalin admitted modestly, but he was, he thought, an authority on "Marxism within philology."

Stalin demolished the "false" foundations of the Marr theory, discoursed at length on vocabulary, morphology, grammar, syntax, the historical and social origins of dialects, patois, and minority languages. The gist of Stalin's wordy, labyrinthian message was that "the Russian language has remained in the main the same as it was before the October upheaval . . . Language is created for the purpose of serving society as a whole . . . [Language] is all-national." Philologist Stalin savagely denounced Marr as a vulgarizer of Marxism, called him arrogant, alien, and demanded the liquidation of the "Marr clique" as saboteurs.

Muddled Comrades. Buried in the Stalinist verbiage was an anecdote that non-Marxists could understand. Wrote Stalin: "We had for some time Marxists who asserted that the railways which remained in our country after the October Revolution were bourgeois railways . . . not worthy of us Marxists; that these railways should be torn up and new ones built--proletarian railways. This earned for the critics the name of Troglodytes. Such a primitive, anarchic view of society [as of] language. . . has nothing to do with Marxism . . . but undoubtedly exists in the minds of some of our muddled comrades."

Last week millions of copies of Stalin on Marxism and Philology were pouring from the Moscow presses for the enlightenment of muddled comrades. It was an occasion when it would undoubtedly be permissible to say "Spasibo."

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